Cross-post from Peekaboo, Andreas Mueller's computer vision and machine learning blog. This post documents his experience in the Impermium Detecting Insults in Social Commentary competition, but rest of the blog is well worth a read, especially for those interested in computer vision and Python scikit-learn and -image. Recently I entered my first kaggle competition - for those who don't know it, it is a site running machine learning competitions. A data set and time frame is provided and the best submission gets a ...

Important reminder for anyone considering entering the $3 million Heritage Health Prize. Registration for the contest closes on 06:59:59 am UTC on October 4, 2012 This is also the deadline for team mergers. After this date, no new contestants will be allowed to enter the contest ( accept the rules or download the dataset ), and no existing teams will be allowed to merge. Existing teams will be able to make submissions until the contest closes on 6:59 am, Wednesday 3 April 2013 ...

First time Kaggler Yasmin Lucero aka Yolio took home 2nd place in the Practice Fusion Open Challenge by combining Electronic Health Records with general population data. Also, lots of good tips on using R for visualizations ( Go ggplot2! ) What was your background prior to entering this competition? I earned my PhD doing mathematical biology and statistics in the field of marine fisheries science. I have done analytical work on a variety of problems in environmental science, mostly working for NOAA (National Oceanographic ...

We catch up with Indy Actuary Shea Parkes on his prize-winning Word Tornado entry to the Practice Fusion Open Challenge. Shea also had the winning entry to the prospect phase of the predictive challenge, which was the source of the Practice Fusion Diabetes Classification contest (in which he placed 5th with NSchneider). These dudes know their healthcare data. What was your background prior to entering this competition? I'm a health actuary with Milliman, Inc. I do some traditional services like pricing and ...

Crossposted from Overkill Analytics, the newly launched extra-curricular data science blog by Gigaom-Wordpress Challenge winner Carter S. You can also read more about his 'overkill' philosophy on Gigaom. I’d like to start this blog by discussing my first Kaggle data science competition – specifically, the “GigaOM WordPress Challenge”. This was a competition to design a recommendation engine for WordPress blog users; i.e. predict which blog posts a WordPress user would ‘like’ based on prior user activity and blog content. This post will ...

Here's a dirty little secret about the news business: If you walk into any newsroom today and flag down a passing journalist, the odds that they will know the difference between a median and a mode; or know how to multiply two fractions; or calculate percentage change, are probably worse than 70/30. It's something journalists wear like a badge of honor. There's even a canned response many reporters will give you, which they no doubt first heard in journalism school: ...

It's not a coincidence that many of the winners of Kaggle competitions are teams rather than individuals. Just as competition drives us to continually improve our models, having collaborators motivates us to keep learning and exploring new ideas that are out of our intellectual comfort-zone (not to mention having someone to split the data-munging with). Some teams consist of Kagglers who know each other offline, students at the same university or departmental colleagues, but many of the strongest collaborations are ...

Where do the top scoring Kagglers go...? …Private competitions, that’s where. And this week, Kagglers are getting their first, behind-the-scenes look at one of these competitions run by Allstate Insurance to predict customer retention. Get ready for a competition unlike any we’ve seen before. If Kaggle is the sport of data science, these private competitions are like the U.S. Open, with a dozen or so of our highest scoring contestants coming together to compete head-to-head. Private competitions are designed for ...

Got an idea for a great Kaggle competition? Let us know! When I came to Kaggle for my first day of work, David, one of our awesome data scientists, greeted me at the door wearing a shirt of me: There is a reasonable explanation of why David was wearing a shirt of me. At Kaggle, many of our best hires have come in through the Kaggle community and our personal networks (like the Google Predict meetup where I met David.) ...